Articles by Dennis Cozzalio

THE 13th ANNUAL MURIEL (MUR13L) AWARDS

Critics groups. The Film Independent Spirits Awards. The Oscars. Whew. Awards season is finally over, right? Well, yes and no. Because though they have been now fully announced, you may not have heard the results from the tallying the 13th annual Muriel Awards, and awards season is not truly over until Muriel has had her…

NICE GOIN’, KID: DICK MILLER (1928-2019)

A lot of words have already been written this week, and hopefully a lot more will be written in the next few weeks, months and years, about the great and beloved character actor Dick Miller, who passed away on January 30th in Burbank, California at age 90.  A quick look at his bio page on…

OUT ON A WEB: THE MOVIES OF 2018

When is the best not the best? I think the answer to this non-rhetorical question that maybe nobody would ever ask in the first place has to be, when one hasn’t the breadth of experience to really answer with any certainty or credibility. Best cheeseburger in my neighborhood? Well, I haven’t sampled them all. But…

THE FAVOURITE

Those who possess more than my cursory knowledge of the history of British royalty have made it clear Yorgos Lanthimos’s new movie The Favourite is bollocks as a historical document. This is a claim that is most likely true, and frankly, I don’t have a problem with that– I doubt the director of Dogtooth and The…

JOE DANTE’S 3D ACE IN THE HOLE

Trailers From Hell readers, as well as all film fans in the Los Angeles area, are getting a special treat this coming Friday evening, when Joe Dante’s marvelous 2010 3D thriller The Hole screens at the TCL Chinese Theaters. The event marks the official launch of the new multimedia brand Untold Horror which, according to…

THE GREAT MOONSHINE FILM FESTIVAL

Every so often the stars align in such a way as to allow a perfectly inert and “nonproductive” weekend spent in the company of four, or five, or maybe even six movies, the sort of cine-bliss-out designed to decompress the mind and spirit after a particularly insistent week of breadwinning. Back in the salad days,…

Game Night

Game Night is as high concept a comedy as they come—a group of very competitive friends who do a weekly game night together find themselves entangled in a kidnapping-smuggling-murder situation which they initially believe is part of an elaborate role-playing extension of their usual easygoing, harmless suburban fun—and as I punched it up on HBO…

Venom

Back in the summer of 2008, I absorbed all the terrible advance notices that the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer was racking up, saw it on opening night, and was delighted to discover that I loved it. I became somewhat evangelistic about the movie, telling everyone I knew that the cranky critics and indifferent audiences were wrong, seeing…

Fahrenheit 11/9

This past weekend Michael Moore’s new movie Fahrenheit 11/9, about how the world as we know it in the Trump age came to be, didn’t set the box office on fire in the manner of his previous incendiary screed against the Bush administration, Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004). And speaking as someone who doesn’t watch box-office predictions…

THE MURIEL AWARDS HALL OF FAME, CLASS OF 2018

In its inaugural year, 2005, I began writing for the Muriel Awards, a year-end voting collective dedicated to summing up the year’s achievements which features accompanying essays by its members, and I’ve written for them every year since. Six years ago, Muriels creator Paul Clark (the award is named after his beloved guinea pig, and…

BURT REYNOLDS (1936-2018) AND DELIVERANCE

This past week Burt Reynolds, perhaps the most self-deprecating movie star to ever cruise to box-office domination, died during a hospital stay in Jupiter, Florida, at the age of 82.  “I’m pretty passionate about my work,” he once said, “even though I sometimes have this realization on the second day of shooting that I’m doing…

THE DESERT HEART OF CHARLEY VARRICK

Had I not recently revisited Don Siegel’s dusty, nail-hard crime thriller Charley Varrick, in fact just the night before seeing Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times, it stands to reason that I probably would not have found myself thinking about the Walter Matthau-starring crime thriller midway through the Taiwanese director’s film. After all, Siegel’s tale of morally…

Eat Me – Animal House at 40

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be brief. The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules or took a few liberties with our female party guests. We did. But you can’t hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few sick, perverted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn’t we blame the…

ON MISADVENTURES AND BEING FUNNY IN AN ALTERNATE HOLLYWOOD: AN INTERVIEW WITH BIFFLE & SHOOSTER’S MICHAEL SCHLESINGER

“Who are you?” “B-I-double F-iffle. Biffle! S-H-double O-ooster. Shooster! We’re Biffle and Shooster! Need we say more?” In 1928, the vaudeville comedy duo of Benny Biffle and Sam Shooster made the transition from the stage to the nascent medium of talking pictures with a pair of Vitaphone one-reelers. That move was a modest but immediate…

THE BEST OF 2018 SO FAR

Here it is, the second week of July already, and I feel as though I’ve barely seen anything in the realm of theatrical movies. Compared to the average movie critic anyway, who probably sees three or four (new) movies a week, to say nothing of the ones she/he sees at home. But my movie consumption…

Q: WHO’S PATSY KELLY? A:…

The following is a slightly re-edited version of a piece that ran during the early days of my blog, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, posted on April 3, 2007, in which I took some time to acknowledge one of my favorite movie stars, the inimitable force of nature known as Patsy Kelly. Eleven…

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY RETURNS IN 70mm

People always say it, and I often do myself: “Seeing (Movie X)  on the big screen again was like seeing it for the first time!” This was emphatically not true for me last night when I took my daughter  to see 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Arclight Cinemas in Hollywood. (It was her first…

TEN THINGS I LEARNED AT TCMFF 2018

TEN THINGS I LEARNED AT TCMFF 2018 Yet another TCM Classic Film Festival is in the bank—the ninth out of nine I’ve been privileged to attend. For those who have a mind to, my extended coverage of the festival—not a blow-by-blow of everything I did, but a look at some of the highlights—is available at…

O THE CHOICES I HAVE! A 2018 TCMFF PREAMBLE

So much time, so few movies to see. Scratch that. Reverse it. Running a little later than usual this year, the 2018 Turner Classic Movies Film Festival gets under way this coming Thursday, screening approximately 88 films and special programs over the course of the festival’s three-and-a-half days, beginning Thursday evening, and no doubt about…

WEEKEND MENAGERIE: A BULL, A BUNNY AND A GO-RILLA

“Walt Whitman once said, ‘I see great things in baseball. It’s our game, the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us.’ You could look it up.” — Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) in Bull Durham Bull Durham, Ron Shelton’s beloved ode to the piquant ambience and perhaps more elusive spirituality…

The Scarlet Empress

The Scarlet Empress (1934), starring Marlene Dietrich, John Lodge, Sam Jaffe, Louise Dresser and “a supporting cast of 1,000 players,” is director Josef von Sternberg at his most grandiose and excessive, which is just another way of saying “at his best,” at the height of a state of expressive delirium no other director has ever…

OUT OF PRINT: THE NEW BEVERLY CINEMA’S HISTORY

The title of Julia Marchese’s testimonial documentary on the history of Los Angeles’ the New Beverly Cinema, Out of Print, began, as her film did, as a way of suggesting the dark future which lay in store for the prospect of 35mm film distribution and exhibition in the early stages of this decade’s industry switch-over…